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| Edited By: Arcopol Chaudhuri |Source: |Updated: Mar 16, 2018, 02:58 AM IST
Shivanandan Pare, COO, Bigadda.com, took charge of Reliance ADAG’s social networking site in August. He has been instrumental, along with Rajesh Sawhney, president of Reliance Big Entertainment, in guiding the group’s strategic investments and expansion into gaming, social networking, movie rentals, FM radio and motion pictures.
In the coming months, Pare will play a crucial role in helping Big Adda make money, launch voice networking applications and also draw deeper synergies between Mobile Adda — the group’s mobile networking platform — and R-Com’s subscriber base. In this interview with Arcopol Chaudhuri, Pare confirms the group’s plans to incubate an ad network and says ad spends will move from horizontal portals to social networking sites. Excerpts:
Why did R-ADAG identify social networking as a vertical to get into?
When Reliance enters any business, it looks at the entire value chain. For people, entertainment consumption happens through movies, FM radio, gaming and through friends. Around the time we launched, the age group of 18-25 years would log onto a social network, see what their friends were doing even before they checked their e-mails. So the audience was there. Ad revenues will now automatically shift there, away from the horizontal portals.
Big Adda doesn’t have a first mover advantage. How will that be overcome, considering Facebook and Orkut already have a tremendous following in India? In India, I think we are the first movers in terms of scale. Do note that Facebook, Orkut, MySpace are failures in the UK, Japan, Korea and China. All thanks to the dominance of local players, who fill a crucial need gap. There is a limitation to how much global players can customise to local needs. True, the early adopters always move to these international sites. But that’s just about 10% of the online population. So the remaining 90% needs to be catered to based on local tastes. This is the gap, which we want to fill. In the last 18 months, we’ve got 3 million registered users. We’re clocking 1.25 million page views a day. Can Facebook or Orkut give Bollywood videos to our users? They can attempt, but only if they have a focus. That’s where we’re more agile.
Where do you think are the other players such as Minglebox, Yaari, Bharatstudent.com, Ibibo.com losing out?
Each of them has found its positioning. It’s difficult to predict who’ll survive, who won’t. But there’s surely space for all of them. How much revenues each will attract will be determined by what position each takes in the Top 10 list. The scales in the Internet will tilt just like they do among television channels or in print.
How many users log on to their Big Adda accounts everyday? And how much time do they spend on the site?
Around 10% of our registered users are regular active users, who log in, say, once in a fortnight. Here we need to understand the Internet usage pattern in India. Out of 45 million Internet users, 50% have access to the Internet on a regular basis — either at home or at office. The rest 50% of users do it through appointment visits, that is, either from cyber cafes or from college labs and that happens once a week or a fortnight. And this user base is increasing. About 20% of our users come from rural India. One out of every five new users come from rural India or Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The average time spent on the site is about 17-18 minutes— mainly on photos, videos and music. Ninety-five per cent of the content is uploaded by users.
Well-known Internet brands became popular through viral campaigns or word-of-mouth. Why did you opt for a mass media campaign?
We promoted Big Adda through offline media only after understanding India’s market realities. Orkut, MySpace, Facebook have been popularised in the US, where Internet penetration is high. So viral marketing is very effective there. Our offline promotions have helped build appointment usage. We’ve spent about $1 million on advertising and promotions since our launch.
So your cost of acquisition per user would be much higher than other sites?
It depends on whether you’re taking a short-term view or long-term. Since the last 18 months, it would seem our costs of acquisition per user would be slightly higher than other players in the Indian market. But we’re here for the long run. The networking effect will reduce these costs in the next 6 years.
Big Adda has also launched on mobile. What kind of traction are you seeing there?
The Mobile Adda application has seen about 2 lakh downloads. About 75,000 of them converted into registered users. 10-15% of them would be regular users. We’re working on voice networking, which will be available in about 2-3 months.
So when do ad revenues start trickling in?
We now have a substantial critical mass of users that advertisers can tap into. It’s been about a month now that my sales team has been pitching our platform to advertisers.
And the response from FMCG companies and banks has been extremely good. They realise that unlike other social networking sites, our potential to hand-hold them will allow their brands to start talking to our users. Primarily, we’re looking at banners, sponsored addas (communities) and contextual ads.
Is it true you’re launching an ad network?
Yes, it’s on the cards. R-ADAG is evaluating options for incubating an ad network separately. An internal team is working on it. But Big Adda has nothing to do with it.
